Previous studies have shown that people implicitly associate the emotional valence of abstract words with vertical position (i.e., positive words up, negative words down), resulting in the so-called valence-space congruency effect. Research has demonstrated that there is a valence-space congruency effect when it comes to emotional words. It's interesting to see that whether the emotional pictures with different levels of valence are mapped to distinct vertical space positions. Here, the event-related potential (ERP) and time-frequency techniques were employed to investigate the neural basis of the valence-space congruency effect of emotional pictures in a spatial Stroop task. Firstly, this study showed that the reaction time of the congruent condition (i.e., positive pictures in the top and negative pictures in the bottom of the screen) was significantly shorter than that of the incongruent condition (i.e., positive pictures in the bottom and negative pictures in the top of the screen), suggesting that exposure to stimuli with positive or negative valence, regardless of whether these stimuli were comprised of words or pictures, would be enough to invoke the vertical metaphor. Moreover, we found that the congruency between the vertical position and the valence of emotional pictures could significantly modulate the amplitude of the P2 component and the Late Positive Component (LPC) in ERP waveforms, as well as the post-stimulus alpha-ERD in the time-frequency plane. This study has conclusively demonstrated the presence of a space-valence congruency effect in emotional pictures and has elucidated the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms associated with the valence-space metaphor.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2023.04.003 | DOI Listing |
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
January 2025
Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw.
When we assess unknown people, we tend to be positively biased: we give them rather good assessments. However, can this positivity bias be limited or moderated? How would emotions of different origins (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurosci Biobehav Rev
January 2025
Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA; Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany. Electronic address:
Understanding how the brain distinguishes emotional from neutral scenes is crucial for advancing brain-computer interfaces, enabling real-time emotion detection for faster, more effective responses, and improving treatments for emotional disorders like depression and anxiety. However, inconsistent research findings have arisen from differences in study settings, such as variations in the time windows, brain regions, and emotion categories examined across studies. This review sought to compile the existing literature on the timing at which the adult brain differentiates basic affective from neutral scenes in less than one second, as previous studies have consistently shown that the brain can begin recognizing emotions within just a few milliseconds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Emot
January 2025
Department of Psychology, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, United Kingdom.
The present study investigated the influence of emotional stimuli in the flanker task. In six experiments, separate influences of anticipating and reacting to valence-laden stimuli (affective pictures or facial expressions) on the flanker effect and its sequential modulation (also known as conflict adaptation) were examined. The results showed that there was little evidence that emotional stimuli influenced cognitive control when positive and negative stimuli appeared randomly during the flanker task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDev Cogn Neurosci
December 2024
Department of Psychiatry, UMC Utrecht Brain Center, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Department of Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Identification of facial expressions is important to navigate social interactions and associates with developmental outcomes. It is presumed that social competence, behavioral emotion labeling and neural emotional face processing are related, but this has rarely been studied. Here, we investigated these interrelations and their associations with age and sex, in the YOUth cohort (1055 children, 8-11 years old).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnn Med
December 2025
Cardiac, Thoracic and Vascular, Sciences and Public Health, University of Padova School of Medicine and Surgery, Padua, Italy.
Background: There has been significant progress in understanding neurosarcoidosis (NS) as a distinct disorder, which encompasses a heterogeneous group of clinical and radiological alterations which can affect patients with systemic sarcoidosis or manifest isolated.
Rationale And Aim Of The Study: The healthcare challenges posed by NS and sarcoidosis in general extend beyond their physical symptoms and can include a variety of psychosocial factors, therefore the recognition of main neuropsychiatric symptoms can be useful to approach patients with NS. Methods: For this purpose, databases such as Pubmed, Medline and Pubmed Central (PMC) have been searched.
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